This is the year China finally became an urban nation. The April census revealed that 49.7% of its 1.34-billion population live in cities.
Now China’s urbanites outnumber their country cousins.
‘The process they have been going through for three decades took four or five decades in Japan and [South] Korea and 100 years in the West,” said Edward Leman, whose Chreon consultancy has advised many Chinese cities on development.
It is not only the extraordinary speed that is ‘unprecedented and unparalleled”, said Professor Paul James of the Global Cities Institute at RMIT University in Melbourne.
‘It represents the most managed process of urbanisation in human history.
‘The state is involved in every way. It manages the building of new cities. It regulates the housing of internally displaced people. It responds actively and sometimes oppressively to new waves of squatters.”
The new five-year plan pushes urbanisation even further, as the government seeks to raise living standards and promote development in the poorer central and western regions.
Worldwide impacts
By 2025, one study suggests, 350-million more people will have moved to cities. Five years later the urban population will top one billion with 221 cities with more than a million inhabitants. The impact will be felt worldwide.
Vice-premier Li Keqiang has argued that urbanisation should be the ‘strategic focus” of expanding domestic demand. China needs to restructure its economy, moving away from exports and investment towards domestic consumption.
In the short term urbanisation creates demand for infrastructure and property; in the longer run urbanites consume vastly more than rural dwellers.
But land seizures by local authorities are one of the main causes of the tens of thousands of protests that break out in China each year.
In September hundreds of villagers in southern Guangdong besieged government buildings and attacked police over confiscated farmland.
Standard Chartered analysts suggested 2.5-million to three million farmers a year lose land to development, rarely with sufficient compensation.
‘Of course urbanisation is good for China — but not this kind of urbanisation,” said Professor Tao Ran, a land issues expert at Renmin University.
What goes up must come down
Corrupt officials are often blamed for taking bribes from developers. But Tao said the problem was more basic. Land is collectively owned and farmers have no right to sell the patches they lease.
Land sales have become one of the main sources of income for local governments, generating as much as a third to a half of revenues in some areas. But the tax system is skewed so that local revenues benefit more from industrial development than from residential use.
The solution, Tao said, is to allow farmers’ collectives to sell the land or build houses upon it themselves, introducing a land sales tax and a property tax to make up the shortfall.
But he predicted: ‘You will see this model continue until it collapses — there is no real reform to make these grand objectives happen.”
Tao was also sceptical about the government’s promotion of distributed urbanisation, arguing that in reality migrants would continue to be attracted to megacities.
‘Some of the plans look good on paper, but in reality the rush to build is creating cities that will have to be completely rethought in 20 years’ time as expectations, aspirations and sustainability imperatives change,” said James of the Global Cities Institute. —